Trees or shrubs, dioecious, glabrous or pubescent with simple, short hairs. Leaves simple, alternate, petiolate, rarely (2 species of Ilex in Borneo) opposite and sessile, the venation reticulate, the small free stipules soon fugacious. Flowers solitary to variously elaborately grouped into cymes (incl. dichasia), racemes, panicles or umbels, these regular or irregular (basically a trichotomous cyme or once-branched dichasium), borne axillarily or laterally, on new or old wood; unisexual by abortion, a rudiment of the aborted part present; 4- to 20- (or more) merous, usually isomerous (except for the aborted portion); sepals united into a short calyx tube or free; petals united into a short corolla tube or free; anthers introresly dehiscent, the filaments adnate to the base of the corolla tube (when present) and opposite the calyx lobes or free; ovary when fertile with locules as many as the petals, disorganized when sterile (pistillodium), the sterile androecium represented by staminodia; style usually lacking or very short; stigmas various, punctiform to disc-like; ovules anatropous; placentation axile; entire flower rarely exceeding 25 mm in diam, frequently not exceeding 10 mm. Fruit a bacco-drupa, usually round or almost so, ca 3-20 mm in diam with 1 seed in each locule (very rarely 2 in each); embryo red, small in copious fleshy endosperm

Habit

Trees shrubs

Distribution

A family of three genera generally distributed throughout the temperate and tropic zones, deserts excepted. Phelline with about 20 species is found in Tasmania, New Zealand and Australia; Nemopanthus, one species in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada; llex with 550-650 species world-wide and the only genus of the family in Panama where four species have been reported